Euphoria in a single stroke

For many people a stroke means death, permanent paralysis, loss of speech or living inside a body cut off from the world of other humans. But for neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor it was ringside seat for research into euphoria.

It all began one morning when a blood vessel burst in her brain and developed into a clot as big as a golf ball, which pressed on her speech centres. What started out as a life threatening, excruciatingly scary but curiously euphoric moment became an opportunity to relate theory to practice.

At TED, Jill Bolte Taylor demonstrates we each have two clearly separate brains by showing us a real but deceased brain complete with several feet of spinal cord.

The "separateness" of the two brains is visually astonishing. Most of us just accept the seamless one-ness of our brains. But Jill Bolte Taylor explains that each brain has it's own personality and unique way of engaging with the world. Serial left and parallel right, joined together by 300 million nerve fibres across the corpus callosum and connected to our bodies via the central nervous system.

In a sense we are "energy beings" says Jill Bolte Taylor. The left hemisphere of the brain tends to define us as a unique individual - an unconscious automatic "I"-ness. The right hemisphere tends to connect us consciously to the universe in an integrated "we-ness".

The right engages with the world through pictures, sounds, tastes, smells and touch. It's the sense-making lobe that makes meaning from the constant stream of energy that floods into our senses.

The left works with language, symbols and signs. It busily organizes, categorizes and sequences activity. It is a successive processor that performs speech or motor actions for us, so we don't have to think about it.

With her language out of action Jill discovered she could not express or understand any words. The spoken word sounded like her Labrador, "woo woo woo woo" and when she tried to speak, the words came out the same way. She also struggled to recognize the printed word and numbers, so dialing a telephone number to get help became an almost impossible task.

Unhampered by the filters, rules and limitations imposed by the left hemisphere, she became overwhelmed by the energy that flowed into her brain, which hurt at first, but developed into feelings of euphoria and a sense of one-ness with the universe.

Here are some questions and activities to explore the world that Jill Bolte Taylor discovered:

1. Thought experiment one: Imagine you only have a left hemisphere brain. What would like be like if you had just a simultaneous "we" cognitive processor? No pattern detector. No processor to interpret incoming sounds, visual images, touch sensations, tastes etc.
2. Thought experiment two: Imagine you only have a right hemisphere brain. What would like be like if you had just a successive "I" cognitive processor? No categorizer. No sequences of new complex actions.
3. What is it about serial cognitive processing, categorizing etc, that might help us define us as individuals - our "I"?
4. What is it about simultaneous processing, sense making, seeing patterns etc, that helps define us as part of the whole - our "We"?
5. The brain features successive and simultaneous process. What other parts of the human body functions feature interdependent pairs. Make a list and explain how do they work together e.g. lungs, breathing in and breathing out.
6. How could you switch off one side of your brain to focus on the kind of thinking performed by the other hemisphere?
7. If you could spend more time exploring the "we"-ness of the right hemisphere of your brain, what journeys of discovery might you want to pursue?
8. Based on Jill Bolte's unintended "experiment", what is Nirvana?
9. How might Near Death Experiences be explained by Jill Bolte's "experiment"?
10. How might we more powerfully connect our inner and outer worlds?
11. What can we learn from reverse-engineering the integrated whole systems approach of our brains to better manage/control/deal with interdependent pairs of activities in our lives that we often consider unique/separate e.g. cost and quality, centralized and decentralized, incremental and transformational innovation?

Real Hyperreality

Thank you Umberto Eco for the word Hyperreality for this is what you experience when you watch this TED Talk. How some works of art can become larger and more "real" than the original.

Adrian Hohler and Basil Jones of Handspring Productions show us how to breathe life into a dead object - a puppet - so the character is larger than life.

They present two of their creations, both feats of "emotional engineering" - a puppet horse that has starring roles in the London and New York productions of War Horse and its ancestor, a hyena created for a 1995 Handspring production of "Faustus in Africa", to play draughts with Helen of Troy.

War Horse is a play based on a book of the same name by Michael Morpugo, about a young boy who falls in love with horse that is conscripted into World War I. He joins up to be reunited with his horse. On stage there are several horses, each with riders aboard, that collectively create the power and danger of a cavalry charge.


They explain that while "an actor struggles to die onstage", "a puppet has to struggle to live" and that this is "a metaphor for life".

Three puppeteers control the Joey the horse, two inside one who manipulates the tail and the other the breathing with his knees, and one who controls the head. All three puppeteers contribute to a whinny or other sounds the horse makes.

Joey's tail flicks, his ears point in different directions which is an emotional indicator of the horse, his chest heaves with breathing, he stamps his feet, gallops, rears up. It is all very convincing.

So here is a workshop to explore some of the issues Handspring raise:

1. In what ways is the hyena the ancestor of the horse? What could we learn from Handspring's process of invention/innovation?
2. If puppets are "emotional engineering" what are the features? How does the engineering relate to the emotions?
3. What is it about the horse puppet that is so mesmerizing?
4. Why do you think the puppeteers seem to disappear from view?
5. Choose from this list and describe how you might think like/act like it. Photon of light, the moon, a spider, an unborn baby, a neuron in your brain, an elephant, the wind, a cuckoo clock.
6. Make a list of unusual objects, people, creatures, etc. that it might be interesting thing to imagine thinking like/acting like. Choose one and describe how you would think or act if you were this.
7. Describe the differences between a puppet and a robot? A puppet and an animation.
8. What could it mean that "an actor struggles to die onstage, but a puppet has to struggle to live." And how is this a metaphor for life?
9. Explain how puppetry is a fusion of technology and art. What helps makes the horse puppets come alive? And how is this related to how artists interpret our world?
10. How could a horse puppet seem more real than real? How could we apply this to other human activities? e.g. product design, leadership .
11. What other art forms are a fusion of technology and art? Make a list of the tool that are used for example in opera, dance, or sculpture and then explain the rules of use of the tool e.g. chisel is used by a sculptor to remove excess stone to reveal a figure inside that previously only existed in the imagination.

Eco, U. (1967, 1986) Travels in Hyperreality. Orlando: Harcourt.

Designer as "change agent"

Paola Antonelli, a curator at MoMa, the New York Museum of Modern Art, discovered at a early age that relationships with objects were easier than with people. And so began a love affair with things.

Throughout her life she has tried to discover what is happening in the world and make the patterns explicit so others can benefit from the knowledge. 

In her role as a curator she is a "knowledge creator". Picking the trends. Suggesting better designs for a better life. Pointing towards the possibilities of low cost affordable designs, not just decoration.

Antonelli regards designers as mavericks who build bridges across the boundaries of ideas, a unique fusion or  confluence of the economic, the social, the cultural, the aesthetic and the scientific, where the result is greater than the sum of the parts. Each design makes some kind of point about what has gone before or amuses us, because it shows us the stupidity or quirkiness of past ideas that seemed a good idea at the time.

She thinks of heaven as "satisifed curiosity", a really comfortable cloud where design dreams are fulfilled. Some of the best designs are "humble masterpieces" where you discover the extraordinary in the ordinary, or even iconic, so that the design points the way to a new and better future.

She argues that designers are "agents of change" increasingly focused on inventing new ways for people to do things. So we behave differently. Remember to take our medicine. Interact more personally and joyfully. Or learn from our mistakes. It's all a kind of "civil disobedience".

Her next show will be about the intersection of science and design, our concerns and issues that design in a partnership with science csn solve, and point us in new directions.

1. Heaven is "satisfied curiosity" for Paola Antonelli. What is heaven for you?

2. If you could create a "humble masterpiece", your own private collection of extraordinary arrangements of ordinary objects, what would it be?

3. In what ways can design make a point? Or show a sense of humor?

4. If Spaniards invented the mop, Italians the pizza and Kentuckians moonshine, what iconic form was invented in your part of the world and why might that be important to you? 

5. As a designer, in what ways are you a maverick, and you pretend something never existed before, or what you create will change what people do?

6. Choose an artfect your wish to redesign. Brainstorm some new scientific aspects (materials e.g. buckbyalls, biomimicry), social aspects (emerging trends in what it means to be human, e.g. brain plasticity), economic aspects (emerging values, eg, wise application of knowledge, sustainability) and aesthetic stuff,(emergent styles, e.g, glamor at every pricepoint). And combine them all into a new idea.

7. What is the difference between design and decoration? Give examples.

8. Think of a big unsolved problem and an extreme means by which you may need to solve it. What "suit for civil disobedience" could you could employ to cause people to engage with you?

9. What could you design that has no real immediate purpose, that just seems a good idea at the time e.g a chair that protects you against radiation.